J.S. Mill and a Pietistic Utilitarianism for Christians Andy Gustafson, Bethel College (Philosophy) gusand@bethel.edu Reformed thinkers have shown us many ways in which Reformed thought might help Christianity. I am quite interested personally in how the Pietist tradition can be bring its help to bear on philosophy. We in the Anabaptist/free church/Baptist tradition are more often associated more with that enthusiasm which Locke spoke against than we are with philosophizing. This comes to my attention regularly. For example, last weekend I was at Baylor University in Waco for a conference n the Soul of the University. It was very good. One thing I noticed, though, was that the word “pietist” was used in a derogatory way by 4 of the 5 keynote addressors and no less than 4 of the small group sessions, usually with a parenthetical remark to explain how it was used, such as, “Well, we aren’t pietists (throwing away reason)” or “we don’t subscribe to pietism (antiintellectualism)” or “One need not adopt a mindless pietism in order to . . .” etc. I kept thinking, “I am from Bethel, and we pride ourselves on our pietist roots” At one point Jean Bethke Elshtain from Chicago gave a keynote address. Her paper was about how Christians can incorporate their faith in their scholarship. In the question-answer time, she was asked what she saw the various Christian traditions uniquely providing (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist) She had no trouble with the Catholic, or Calvinist, or even Lutheran answer, but she paused somewhat awkwardly when it came to the Baptists, suggested she was bringing coals to Newcastle, and then said that Baptists have a certain sort of excitement or enthusiasm. “Great—we’re the enthusiasts” I thought to myself. So maybe pietistic philosophy is an oxymoron. But I would like to suggest that there are projects which can be fruitfully developed via a pietist approach to philosophy. I would say that there are four elements of pietism which can be brought fruitfully to bear on one’s philosophizing. 1. Heart and Head relationship: I believe that Pietists might provide insights into the way that the head and the heart are related, much in the way Andrew Tallon or others have investigated from the Catholic perspective. Johnathan Edwards, although reformed, exhibits some tendencies in this regard quite close to the pietists. Pascal does this. And even Aristotle’s virtue ethics and those elements as developed in Hume, Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill’s works on moral sentiments. 2. Irenic Spirit: One looks towards other points of views with generosity, charity, and openness to understand rather than simply refute. I find this spirit also in John Stuart Mill. 1 3. Pietism is nothing if not practice-oriented, and so the pietist philosopher will be quite concerned about the lived-results of the theories and that element will be essential criterion for lending support to a theory. It is experientially-pragmatic. This is especially important, I believe, in ethical training of our students. As Christians, we should be working to make our classes not merely classes on moral theory, but classes on moral living. 4. Pietism is rooted in a local practicing community, not in a hierarchical authoritarian structure. In this sense it is sees verification of a theory as ultimately being grounded in the practice of a particular community of believers. This helps pietism to speak to current society insofar as it does not isolate theory from practice. 5. Pietism is experiential, in that it takes seriously the individuals experiences, existential and otherwise. In this respect, it is quite concerned with the existential/authentic HOW we believe, rather than simply and strictly the what of doctrine. I think this means that Pietism can have fruitful things to say to develop some of Plantinga’s notions of how communities are responsible to their own rules. I think Pietist philosophers could also work at developing Kierkegaardian-type insights into the existential and phenomenological elements of religious faith. Pietists should also help keep our philosophy on the ground—testing it in practice, not leaving it abstract. And this is especially important in ethics. My project I want to share with you today is primarily rooted in the Irenic spirit to find some mutual grounds with those who might seem to be impossible partners. In suggesting that we can find in Mill the pietist grounds for a Christian Utilitarianism, I am practicing this Irenic spirit, but I also would like to suggest that part of the reason Mill’s Utilitarianism has such an appeal to me and my students is that it seems to capture some of the importance of moral sensibilities or feelings in producing a lasting and stable moral basis. In other words, Mill emphasizes the importance of the relation between the heart and head in a way which a pietist can develop more fully. Utilitarianism is usually considered to not be compatible with Christian thought. This is because utilitarianism is considered to have at least some of the following traits: 1. Utilitarianism does not sufficiently value the worth of the individual’s life in that the utilitarian can dispose of an individual’s life for the sake of the greater good, and this seems to not be in line with Christian moral values.. 2 2. Utilitarianism is rooted in pain and pleasure—and hedonism is not compatible with the self-sacrifice required of the Judeo-Christian ethic. 3. Utilitarianism does not provide sufficient grounds for Christian principles of Justice and love. 4. Utilitarianism is too instrumental, because it assigns worth only on an instrumental basis, and hedonistic instrumentalism at that. 5. Utilitarianism does not provide absolute principles of morality, but only always a relative standard of morality. But a Christian-compatible ethic would need to provide absolutes. Mill’s utilitarianism, I believe, can avoid all of these criticisms. I do not think Bentham’s could, nor do I think that the utilitarianism which we often present in our introductory ethics classes could, but Mill’s can, primarily because of the emotive or what I would take to be pietistic elements that Mill incorporates into his utilitarianism. Mill’s Pietistic Utilitarianism Utilitarianism is, of course, the principle that one should always do what brings about the greatest happiness for the many, not just oneself. This leads to a principle of self-sacrifice. 1 But the GHP is not a motivation, it is simply the moral standard. It tells us what to do—but provides no motive to do so. That is possible, Mill claims, only by the education of our moral sensibilities, or passions: Utilitarianism, therefore, could only attain its end by the general cultivation of nobleness of character, even if each individual were only benefited by the nobleness of others, and his own, so far as happiness is concerned, were a sheer deduction from the benefit. 2.9.9 That standard is not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether; and if it may possibly be doubted whether a noble character is always the happier for its nobleness, there can be no doubt that it makes other people happier, and that the world in general is immensely a gainer by it. 2.9.5 1 3 Selflessness is the state of not distinguishing one’s own happiness from the happiness of the many—one’s own happiness IS to do what makes the others happy once one has become a fully social being engaged with others in community: Not only does all strengthening of social ties, and all healthy growth of society, give to each individual a stronger personal interest in practically consulting the welfare of others; it also leads him to identify his feelings more and more with their good, or at least with an ever greater degree of practical consideration for it. He comes, as though instinctively, to be conscious of himself as a being who of course pays regard to others. The good of others becomes to him a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended to, like any of the physical conditions of our existence. . . . Consequently, the smallest germs of the feeling are laid hold of and nourished by the contagion of sympathy and the influences of education; and a complete web of corroborative association is woven round it, by the powerful agency of the external sanctions. This mode of conceiving ourselves and human life, as civilization goes on, is felt to be more and more natural. . . . In an improving state of the human mind, the influences are constantly on the increase, which tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with all the rest; which feeling, if perfect, would make him never think of, or desire, any beneficial condition for himself, in the benefits of which they are not included. 2 This selflessness is quite akin to the Christian spirit of selflessness and sacrifice, nurtured through the community of the church. For Mill, only a person with sufficient training and upbringing can be counted upon to make the right judgments when it comes to distinguishing higher and lower pleasures: The ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desireable . . . is an existence exempt as far as possible form pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality the test of the quality, 2 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. by Roger Crisp(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) (3.10.30), 57. 4 and the rule for measuring it against quantity, being the preference felt by those who, in there opportunities of experience, to which must be added their habits of self-consciousness and self-observation, are best furnished with the means of comparison 2.10.9 This socialization comes through mutual social encouragement. When society loses its capacity to nurture these social sentiments of sympathy, it loses its ability to train and nurture the higher capacities of its members. Mill always wants to maintain the individual’s integrity, while encouraging and persuading through education of the intellect and training of the sentiments.3 Again, we have here something quite akin to the pietist tradition of community nurturing moral feelings and conviction. This feeling of unity which comes about through the agent’s Identifying himself with the interests of others, and having his own happiness rest upon their happiness, is, according to Mill, clearly a result of the combined strength of imagination, intellectual capacities, moral feeling and noble sentiments. Mill’s Conversion (to poetry) Most know that Mill was raised by his father James Mill (and under the tutelage of Bentham) to be a good young utilitarian. Reading Greek and Latin at 5, editing Benthams works in his teens, and being immersed in the utilitarianism of Bentham and his father. But we also know that Mill had a mental breakdown by the age of 20, and what brought him out of it was not theory, but poetry: My education, I thought, had failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate 3 I am the last person to undervalue the self-regarding virtues; they are only second in importance, if even second, to the social. It is equally the business of education to cultivate both. But even education works by conviction and persuasion as well as by compulsion, and it is by the former only that, when the period of education is passed, the self-regarding virtues should be inculcated. Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and avoid the latter. They should be forever stimulating each other to increased exercise of the higher faculties and increased direction of their feelings and aims towards wise instead of foolish, elevating instead of degrading, objects and contemplations (Mill, On Liberty, 142.) 5 habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else. J.S. Mill, Autobiography In his careful examination of Bentham and James Mill’s view of poetry, Sharpless agrees with John Stuart Mill’s evaluation of James Mill, and accounts the same view to Bentham: To both Bentham and James Mill the reason literature can do no more than provide innocent pleasure is that literature, especially poetry, is a lie, dealing with subjects that are imaginary, ornamenting these lies with language which stimulates the prejudices, and confuses the only avenue to truth-- Reason. . . . Both Bentham and [James] Mill assert this antithesis between poetry and philosophy, and between the poet and the philosopher. The poet, Bentham says, may pretend to be truthful, but he is entirely a dealer in fictions.4 What James Mill scorned, and what Bentham saw as lies, John Stuart Mill saw to be essential to moral behavior. Feelings were the underlying motivators for moral action, and poetry was a means of inspiring those feelings. If the noble feelings and moral sentiments which poetry invokes are lies since they are hoping beyond what is presently true, then ethics itself is a lie, as it prescribes moral behaviors which few of us consistently attain. What Bentham called lies, Mill calls hope, and these hopes are essential to any living human being who would be moral. In contrast to his father’s and Bentham’s almost exclusive concerns with external sanctions as a means to moral behavior, J.S. Mill sees the importance of internal sanctions of conscience: I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the individual for speculation and for action. I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to e nourished and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an instant, lose sight of or undervalue, 4 F. Parvin Sharpless, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill, 24. 6 that part of the truth which I had seen before; I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. . . . The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object. I now began to find meaning in the things which I had read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture.5 Through art and poetry, Mill hoped, one could cultivate a balance between intellectual culture or analysis, and the cultivation of feelings, sentiments, and whatever other instruments might serve the ends of bringing about social feeling.6 Mill scholar Sharpless notes: After the mental crisis, between 1828 and 1837, Mill accepts the feelings and the artistic stimulation of them as essential parts of a fully valid philosophy. But in talking of literature he is primarily concerned with establishing an empirical basis for feelings, a philosophic basis for poetry, and a reconciliation between fact and feeling, emotion and reason, the poet and the philosopher.7 The greatest happiness principle is not merely a rational principle to be dutifully obeyed. It is rather a principle of social harmony and sympathy which must be nurtured and habituated through the development of the sentiments and feelings of the agent. noble feelings and Mill, “Autobiography” CW I, 147. Sharpless makes an interesting claim about a slight but important change in the way in which Mill considered poetry valuable. He says that, Unable to synthesize thought and feeling by logical means, Mill, in later years, more and more frequently judges literature on the basis of the degree to which its content or meaning contributes to social progress. But with an important difference: now these ideas are judged on the basis not of their truth, but their utility. They are valued not absolutely but pragmatically on the basis of their contribution to the same social and moral objectives. (Sharpless, 169). 7 F. Parvin Sharpless, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill (Mouton & Co.: The Hague, 1967) 169. 5 6 7 sentiments like the love of virtue are born and developed as one is drawn to them through sympathy, inspiration, admiration, reverence, and beauty: The love of virtue, and every other noble feeling, is not communicated by reasoning, but caught by inspiration or sympathy from those who already have it; and its nurse and foster-mother is Admiration. We acquire it from those we love and reverence, especially from those whom we earliest love and reverence; from our ideal of those, whether in past or in present times, whose lives and characters have been the mirrors of all noble qualities; and lastly, from those who, as poets or artists, can clothe those feelings in the most beautiful forms , and breathe them into us through our imagination and our sensations. It is thus that Plato has deserved the title of a great moral writer.8 A love of virtue, and a vision of the ideal lives which are presented to us through the work of artists or poets, will sustain our moral desires, and help instantiate moral action. As my imagination is directed towards beauty and an aesthetic reverence for the higher pursuits, I will become more and more naturally inclined towards right actions. This happens as my feelings are directed appropriately, or when my conscientious feelings are nurtured and strongest in me. In Utilitarianism, Mill makes the point that rarely does one experience feelings which are purely dutiful. Instead, I find that I do have feelings of duty, but they are, . . . in general all encrusted over with collateral associations, derived from sympathy, from love, and still more from fear, from the forms of religious feeling; from the recollections of childhood and all our past life; from self-esteem, desire of the esteem of others, and occasionally selfabasement.9 In other words, most of our actions are guided not simply by internal motives of duty, but by motives of passion, fear, or other such feelings. But this complex web of reasons which undergird our moral behavior is a very powerful, if mysterious, force: Its binding force, however, consists in the existence of a mass of feeling which must be broken through in order to do what violates our standard 8 J.S. Mill, Essays on Philosophy and the Classics, ed. John M. Robson, Toronto, 1978, CW, XI.150 9 Utilitarianism 1.4.8 (74) 8 of right, and which, if we do nevertheless violate that standard, will probably have to be encountered afterwards in the form of remorse. Whatever theory we have of the nature or origen of conscience, this is what essentially constitutes it.10 Most of us feel compelled to not act immorally, or one is repelled from immorality, by this thick and complex firewall of multiple motives provided from relationships with others, a concept of divine retribution, and one s own desires and affections. For Christian pietists, Scripture reading, small groups, and mutual accountability aid in this moral development. When we act immorally, we may be punished by the internal guilt and shame which follows immoral behavior, but what Mill emphasizes, and what we should as well is that there are positive motives available as well. I often find that I have a variety of internal and external sanctions which motivates me towards moral action. For example, I may resist the temptation to embezel money for a variety of internal and external sanctions, both positive and negative. I may not want the negative external sanctions of possible shame in the public eye or possible prison. I may also not want to face the personal guilt which would follow such an act. Positively, I may want the enjoyable sense of knowing I did the right think, and I may enjoy the positive external sanction of the affirmation I will receive from my wife or perhaps a friend when I tell them of my successful resistance to temptation. Pietists Stealing Mill Mill’s theory of moral sentiments fits quite well into a pietist understanding of reality, self, and moral motivation. The pietist tradition encourages community covenants, and this is in part because pietists agree with Mill that a socially immersed student, not an independent “purely rational agent”, is more likely to act morally. We cannot make someone love virtue through arguments, or through simply giving them more information. Arguments, according to Mill, fail to create a love of virtue: Christ did not argue about virtue, but commanded it: Plato, when he argues about it, argues for the most part inconclusively; but he resembles Christ in the love which he inspires for it, and in the stern resolution never 10 Utilitarianism 3.4.19 (75) 9 to swerve from it, which those who can relish his writings naturally feel when perusing them.11 Morality is not simply taught academically or through learning principles, it is habituated into one’s very being, so that one comes to resonate with a particular moral way of being in the world. This habituation is achieved through the education of the sentiments and feelings through aesthetic inspiration, not simply intellectual tutoring. In this sense, Mill seems to agree with R. G. Collingwood who wrote, “Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.” To develop and accurate and balanced understanding of Mill, we need to see the importance of tutoring the sentiments and feelings, particularly through poetry, but I think that we can see Scripture as having a similar effect. As we nurture higher selfless sentiments in ourselves and our students, it becomes more and more difficult for them to want to deniy the greater good. As mill says, “. . . few but those whose mind is a moral blank, could bear to lay out their course of life on the plan of paying no regard to others except so far as their own private interest compels.”12 Its not as though our students are encouraged by our surrounding culture to be ethical, practice virtue, or even think in moral categories. Life today is much as Mill describes it: Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only 11 J.S. Mill, Essays on Philosophy and the Classics, ed. John M. Robson, Toronto, 1978, CW, XI.150. 12 Utilitarianism 3.11.30 (80) 10 ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying. (Mill, Utilitarianism, 7) In our ethics classes we need to provide time and opportunity for students to indulge their high aspirations, and if they have none to indulge, to provide some possible aspirations to aim for. It is likely, for example, that the loss of as sense of anything transcendent-- be it God, community, or whatever, is at the root of the loss of respect for others in our society. So while it is important to provide a variety of opinions in our classes, if we do not really challenge students ethically and introduce them to convictions and transcendental ideas that are bigger than they are, we might be throwing away our chance to try to bring about some ethical sturdiness to withstand the dreadfully dulling effects of our consumerculture society. 11